in the last five interviews in a row—
interviews 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12—we are
confident that we reached saturation.

Results

Our results are threefold and thus organized in three subsections. First, we
describe the impact of customer satisfaction with the development process
on overall project success, substantiating the relevance of this kind of satisfaction. Second, we present customer
expectations toward the development
process. While we describe the expectations in general, Table 4 provides
an overview of the concrete expectations along with their definition and
exemplary quotes from the interviews.
Finally, we describe approaches for
managing customer expectations, which
can be applied to increase customer
satisfaction and ultimately project success. Beginning with factors that influence customer expectations, we present
and describe in detail the eight identified approaches for managing those
expectations, which are substantiated
with numerous quotes from our interviews. In conclusion, Figure 2 schematically visualizes the results.

Customer Satisfaction

All respondents indicate a high relevance
of customer satisfaction with the development process. Thomas, for instance,
attaches the “uppermost importance
[to the development process]. The excellent cooperation with the customers is
decisive for whether the customers get
what they want.” As Ben explains, “
satisfaction during the process is, of course,
important to increase motivation and
communication in the process as well as
the priority of the process.” With higher
process satisfaction, communication in
the project increases and a cooperative
climate is created in which customer
and contractor collaborate to realize
ideas. However, the relevance of this
kind of satisfaction can be lower if the
customer does not want a high degree of
involvement: “For customers who want
to get involved, it is highly important.

labels of the individual transcripts. In
the process of this integrated coding
(see Figure 1), redundancies were eliminated and the wordings of different
respondents consolidated.

By following an inductive, qualitative coding, we ground our study
on in-depth insights from interviews.
What emerged was an understanding
of process expectations in ISD projects
and how project managers attempt to
address these.

Quality Criteria

By sending the interview transcripts
back to the respondents for verification,
we ensured communicative validity
(Flick, 2009). The coding and categorization were performed by all three
authors. While one author conducted
data-driven coding based on insights
from our interviews, the other two acted
as “resident devil’s advocates” and tried
to find rival explanations (Eisenhardt,
1989). We ensured plausibility (Guba,
1978; Patton, 2015) of the categorization by independently verifying the conceptual sense of the results. Finally,
we analyzed our data with regard to
the important goal of reaching theoretical saturation (Glaser & Strauss,

1967; Strauss & Corbin, 2015). Becauseno new approaches were identifiedthematic labels, which were derivedeither from our interview questions(e.g., relating to the relevance of thecustomer satisfaction with the develop-ment process; see Appendix A) or, incase of open-ended questions, from theanswers of our respondents (e.g., relat-ing to specific expectation managementapproaches such as transparency). Tosituate our research within its socialand technical setting, we extractedboth contextual information (i.e.,direct quotes from the interviews) andabstraction from the contextual details(i.e., expectations and approaches)(Klein & Myers, 1999). Because ourresearch is informed by a single groupof respondents, our interpretationsrely on a single perspective. However,we interviewed managers from severalcompanies. We cycled among multiplereadings of the interview transcripts ofrecurring themes to establish a compre-hensive understanding of the respon-dents’ elaborations and to take otherpotential explanations into account(Klein & Myers, 1999). Finally, the the-matically structured individual tran-scripts were integrated into one tablewith interviews as rows, thematic cat-egories as columns, and respective textpassages in the cells. Categories werederived by consolidating the thematic